Who are you?

As I configure my quarter century crisis, I always tell myself I know almost everything that I want in life and although the resources are not always at arms reach, the goal is very much possible. I suppose you can say modern aged women are placed with a tremendous amount of pressure before they reach their twenties. By the age of twenty, you should have it all figured out and you need to begin putting it all together throughout that decade you have coming along. Great. I once recall having a conversation with a woman twice my age. She was seemingly lost. Her entire life had been swept from under her feet. She had initially established it all in her twenties. From the ground up, she made a business and a family alongside a wonderful partner. That’s who she was. A business, a mother and a loving partner. Nearly a decade later, she had lost her business and her partner. Her maternal instincts never vanished, but she had. Without two important factors which made her who she thought she was, she was utterly and completely lost. Years after the hardships she faced living with the missing gaps, here we were. Her face, lost as that of a child who had been placed in the world far too early to fend for themselves. I simply turned to her in our discussion as she expressed how empty she felt and I said, “well, what do you like to do?”, assuming that keeping busy with daily activities will create some life inside of her again. She looked at me with the most frightened and blankest of stares. As if she had just seen a ghost. The thought of getting to know herself and who she truly was, was the most terrifying idea for her. Everything she knew to be was what her past included. She no longer had that. She had spent the next couple of years of her life merely existing. How unfortunate this was. A beautiful, intelligent woman with no idea who she was. She had allowed factors in her life to determine who she was. But that wasn’t who she was at all. This made me wonder. Are many of us guilty of this? Do we let the people in our lives sometimes control us to believe we are someone we aren’t? Do we live a life of content and not true happiness just to say we have it all? I immediately recognized, I was terrified of that idea.